Fragment
by Sheryl Holmes
Summary: John remembers his time with Sherlock in the aftermath of the Reichenbach Fall. An angsty one-shot. Could be read as close friends or JohnLock.


Only Sherlock Holmes would kill himself outside a hospital. It was just so _apropos_ , so perfectly _Sherlock_ to do something so, so painful to those who loved him. To kill himself where others were saved, to end it where others' lives began, where infants took their first breaths. It was so undeniably, irrefutably _Sherlock_ to take his life close enough to medical care that it would instill just the tiniest spark of hope in John that maybe, _just maybe_ , the doctors could save him. Of course they couldn't; he'd felt the wrist, felt the serrated twist of a metaphorical knife catching against the walls of his heart as he realized that without a doubt, Sherlock had no pulse.

 _I'm a doctor, let me come through. Let me come through._

Suicide, John believed, was not—as so many claimed—an act of selfishness, not on its own. But, of course, Sherlock could make it one.

Only Sherlock would have been so cruel in his last act. Only Sherlock could make suicide an act of irony.

 _Please. No, he's my friend. He's my friend. Please._ _ **Please**_ _, let me just…Jesus, no._ _ **God, no**_ _._

When Anderson asked, voice strangely pained, "Are you sure it was Sherlock?" there was no other answer he could give. Of course it was Sherlock. Of course it was him. Who else could it have been? Forget the body, forget that it was _his_ trench, _his_ scarf, forget the darkened curls bloodied by his opened skull, the cheekbones sharp enough to nearly split the skin in bruising John's fist—and Lord knew, he had. But the method…the method was _so clearly Sherlock_. He had a gun on that roof, up there with Moriarty. He could have killed himself with the bullet. Instead, he jumped. And he made John watch.

 _Keep your eyes fixed on me._

John knew few people had seen as much of Sherlock as he had—that he understood Sherlock in some ways even Mycroft didn't.

 _I don't have friends. I've just got one._

That didn't stop John from wanting to see more, to be greedy, to see _within_ that brilliant, self-tormenting, egotistical mind. But in that one moment, John saw more of Sherlock than he had ever hoped to see. He saw what was within him, literally, as it spilled out onto the pavement.

 _It's okay._

 _No it's NOT! It's NOT okay!_

John thought all these things. He sat in the police station across from Inspector Lestrade, clutching to edge of his sweater sleeve, to the crusting blood of the...best friend…closest man…the _most important person_ …the person he most cared about in the world. No definition. Who was he to him? To ask that question now…to only now wonder what they were to one another. More than friends, something undefinably intricate. Something John couldn't find in a dictionary. Something he'd never, ever find again.

The blood. On his sweater. Evidence that this life, this mind, this undefinable _soul_ , had somehow vanished from the world. How does that happen? How can something that strong just…vanish? How does it die? How could a head, a mind that clever be so…fragile?

"What did he say to you?" Lestrade's voice echoed through the room, grief-ridden and strained. It met John's ears as if they were underwater. He barely heard him. He understood the question in another context. Nearly catatonic, he ran through in his mind all the things he'd ever said to Sherlock Holmes, all the things Sherlock had ever said to him.

Things he wished he could take back.

 _She's dying, you MACHINE!_

Things he wouldn't take back for the world.

 _Punch me in the face._

 _…You've got to remember, Sherlock. I was a soldier. I killed people._

 _You were a doctor!_

 _I had bad days!_

The sound of a bullet through a window. The day they met. Sherlock in that ridiculous orange blanket.

In a laughable deerstalker cap.

In his dressing gown, playing the violin at the window.

 _BORED._

Shooting a happy face into the wall of their flat—the flat they shared. Where he first met Sherlock's other friend, a skull on a mantelpiece. Where he first was asked to join him at a crime scene. Where he would never again find human body parts in the refrigerator. The flat where he would never again wake up to beautiful music at 1AM and pretend to be angry.

God, how could he go home? Where _was_ home?

A tiny voice in the back of his mind told him his home was probably on a metal table right now, naked and cold, being autopsied by Molly Hooper.

"John?"

John swallowed, still seeing Sherlock's eyes, lifeless, staring upward to the clear blue sky, blood on his forehead.

"He said…that the phone call was his…note. His—" John's voice, toneless up until now, cracked on the word, " _suicide_ note."

Greg nodded, but John didn't see. He was seeing other things. Sherlock wearing a priest's garb. Drugged and passed out on his bed. Kissing Molly on the cheek out of _kindness_. Telling Anderson to _stop thinking_ —such a prick. Such a sarcastic, scathing, brilliant, complex, masterful...

 _That was…amazing._

 _That's not what people usually say._

"Did he…say anything else?" Greg was trying so hard to be professional, to keep it together. John's eyes cleared enough to see that Greg was on the verge of tears, blinking profusely. Feeling as if he wasn't even within his own body, John absently realized there were droplets on his hands, soaking into the edge of his sleeve, wetting the dried blood there. He couldn't feel his face, but he knew these were his tears.

"Did he…," John trailed off. He screwed his eyes shut. He couldn't relive this. Not again. Not for the hundredth time this night. Greg—no, _Inspector Lestrade_ wanted to know what Sherlock had said. _Greg_ wanted this to be over as much as John did, but his job wouldn't allow for it. He knew how many times John had replayed the image in his mind in the past several hours. How many times he'd begged God to just let this be a nightmare. He couldn't remember again. Not again…not again…

The fall.

The coat billowing in the wind.

The air sucked from John's lungs, forced from Sherlock's. At the same moment, simultaneously breathless.

John groaned. He wondered vaguely if Sherlock had seen all these things, too. If perhaps this replay of their time together was but a brief fragment of the moment Sherlock's life flashed before his eyes—if that concept were to be believed. It seemed cruel to be reminded that they had only two years together before this…that Sherlock's life had been so much longer and their bond so brief by comparison. A bond broken by a fall.

Falling.

Falling.

Standing on the edge of St. Bart's.

 _No one could be that clever._

 ** _You_** _could._

The last things they'd ever said to one another.

 _Goodbye, John._

 _SHERLOCK!_


End file.
